Bjo Trimble Talks About Saving 'Star Trek'

Bjo Trimble, who organized campaigns to keep the original Star Trek series from cancellation in the late 1960s along with her husband John, said in a recent interview that she had wanted to make certain NBC was aware of fan passion for the show: "We would grab things and run, and do things when they needed to be done."

Speaking to Michael Hinman of SyFy Portal, Trimble described her initial meeting with Gene Roddenberry at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1967 and the friendship they developed, which led to the Trimbles' efforts to save the show when it was slated to be cancelled at the end of the second season.

"People would go in front of the camera and do their acting, then come back, and be so down and so depressed," she recalled. "We found out that they had gotten the kind of word that troops get before the general is due."

Roddenberry had wondered whether there was a way to lobby the fans, and the Trimbles organized a campaign using mailing lists from booksellers and convention dealers to contact viewers, hoping that the word would spread. Their creation of prototype letters eventually got them jobs answering Roddenberry's fan mail.

But first, they successfully got Star Trek renewed for a third season, which secured its legacy in a concrete way by making it much more likely that the series would be picked up for syndication. "We did something that a lot of people don't realize the importance of...after the show was cancelled, it went into reruns almost immediately," Trimble said.

Though Trimble called Roddenberry "a conniver", she is quick to add that connivers succeed in Hollywood, and that she always found him charming. She remains sorry that she and her husband were unable to attend his funeral.

You can read more of the first part of Hinman's interview with Trimble, to be concluded next week, here at SyFy Portal.